


Into the Blue

by whereismygarden



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Conventions, Cosplay, F/M, Military Backstory, Minor Character Death, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, alcohol mention, eventual political commentary, single parent, that's unfortunately topical
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-04
Updated: 2020-10-11
Packaged: 2021-02-27 05:01:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 17,198
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22121485
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whereismygarden/pseuds/whereismygarden
Summary: Rey finds a lost kid on the convention floor. More accurately, a lost kid finds her.or:Modern day AU where Ben Solo is a single dad, Rey is an underemployed graduate, and the shadows of the past are never that far from anyone's heels.
Relationships: Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 66
Kudos: 145





	1. Chapter 1

Rey is stressed. The vendor hall is just not as nice as the artists’ alley. It’s louder, more crowded, more commercial, _definitely_ a good ten degrees warmer, and actually more dangerous to her finances. Art is expensive—she has to really love a print to buy it. Little tchotchkes going for five dollars seem like less of a commitment. For example, the screen-printed bookmarks with Lord of the Rings quotes on them are kind of tempting, even though Rey has never used a bookmark that wasn’t a Kroger receipt or library slip in her life.

She reaches into her messenger bag for her phone and checks the time. Only two thirty, and the meetup for the photoshoot was canceled earlier this morning. It’s probably for the best—those things are never organized well, and overpopulated with sugar-fueled teenagers. It has left her and Finn at semi-loose ends for the afternoon, though, since she’s not sure she wants to commit to spending twenty bucks on a writing seminar, nor to trekking outside to the other hotel for the only panel of interest this afternoon.

The vendor hall is fine. She can maybe go and get condescended to by the bros talking robotics. Or maybe not. She’s in full cosplay—a totally modest one, too—but she’ll stick out like a sore thumb in a group of guys all in Star Trek t shirts. Someone already asked her _so are you like, lady Thor?_ and the last thing she wants to do is argue about the validity of a rebooted cartoon that horny adult men are slightly less likely to jack off to compared to its twentieth century predecessor.

Rey thinks for a moment that her cape has gotten caught on something when she feels a tug from below.

“She-Ra.” It’s a very quiet, little voice. She turns, sees nothing, and the tug comes again. Oh, right. She looks down.

There’s a little girl. Her head doesn’t even come up to Rey’s waist, not in the boots she’s wearing now. She has black hair, round brown eyes, and a blotchy face. Rey sees the shimmer of tears in her eyes, though none have spilled over yet. Her heart clenches.

“Hi,” she says with a smile, and slowly crouches to one knee. “What’s your name?” The kid seems scared to speak, lips trembling. Rey glances around quickly, but just sees the usual con crowd swarming by, no mind paid to the child. The girl’s hair is drawn back from her face in a half-ponytail like Rey usually wears, but someone has braided the tail and tied a purple ribbon around it. The sense-memory of scraping her own hair into three buns for days and months and years has her clenching her fists around the plastic hilt of her sword. Her heart is starting to slam in her chest, but she continues to smile.

“Maya,” the girl whispers. Her hands are balled into fists.

“Are you okay, Maya?” Rey asks softly. The answer is obviously _no_ , but she doesn’t want the kid to freak out. She has a ferocity that Rey relates to, though clearly it is slipping away and being replaced with fear.

“Idon’tknowwheremyauntis,” she blurts out, then the tears start to spill, along with some snot. Rey reaches her hand out and takes one of Maya’s little ones, squeezing gently.

“You’re lost, huh?” The girl nods, wiping her face with her free hand. “Well,” Rey says, her first priority being to comfort the cracking heart in front of her, “I’ve been lost in scary places before.”

“Like in the woods?” Maya is still crying, but she’s already slightly distracted. Rey nods.

“Yup. And when you’re lost, it’s good to find a friend. So you’ve already done that first part.” Maya nods her head wordlessly, tears continuing to spill down her face.

Rey rummages in her bag until she finds the pack of travel Kleenex she stashed there. There’s only one left, as yesterday she’d used them to cover a toilet seat contaminated with bright blue body paint. She does have a few loose napkins from the Waffle House, though.

“Here,” she says, and tilts her sword towards the girl. “Hold this for me while I wipe your nose.”

She’s not really sure how to do this, but she dabs and wipes at Maya’s face until most of the snot and tears are gone. Her face is a little streaky, sure, but Rey counts it as a win.

“You’re looking for your aunt?” she confirms.

“Yes,” Maya says, with a wobble in her voice. Rey hurries to continue speaking.

“A quest,” she says, maybe channeling a bit more _Bow_ than _She-Ra_ , but she’s an engineer, not an actress. “Okay, let’s find her.”

Rey thinks the ability of a preschooler (kindergartener? She can’t tell) to describe her aunt is probably not going to be especially useful. Unless the aunt in question is a total fuckup, though, she’s probably going to be looking for the kid. She pulls out her phone and texts Finn.

- _Meet me. Vendors section B6. Emergency._

“Here’s the plan,” she tells Maya. “We will be much taller if you sit on my shoulders, okay?” And much more visible. Especially if Rey also stands on any number of crates in the vicinity. “And you can tell me where you last saw your aunt, and whether you walked far.”

Rey crouches further down and lets the girl clamber onto her shoulders. She’s wearing teal socks and red sneakers that are firmly double-knotted. They’re also full of Atlanta street grime, but she’s a dipshit for making a white costume anyway. Maya grabs onto the winged crown and long pale wig Rey is wearing, tugging at the cap and real hair stuffed underneath. Rey grimaces.

“Here, hold my cape and I’ll hold your legs,” she instructs. The cape is serged onto the rest of the costume, and the pleats should make for an easy grip.

“Sorry,” Maya cheeps. She’s not very heavy, but she’s not the smallest child Rey’s ever seen. Her heels dig into Rey’s chest for balance. After a moment of settling which is definitely loosening her wig, Maya stills. Rey makes sure she isn’t stepping on her own cape and straightens up slowly, till Maya is lifted above the crowd.

Finn chooses this moment to return, face anxious, breath fast. He has a couple new pins on the bag that doubles as the quiver for his costume.

“Rey,” he says, drawing up in front of her.

“Bow!” Maya says. Finn raises a hand and waves weakly.

“Rey, what--?”

“Lost kid,” Rey says shortly. “I figured being visible would help. Bring me one of those boxes, will you?”

“Should I call the hotline?” Finn whispers.

“What, is there one for the con?” That’s a good thing to have, really.

“No, the police!”

“No, let’s not. Let’s try to figure this out before we decide the world has ended.” She stares over at the boxes. “Box, please.”

Finn does her one better and takes a folding mini stepladder from where it leans by a booth selling tiers of mass-produced Star Trek uniforms, Harry Potter robes, and superhero suits. The quality seems about that of a pop-up Halloween shop, in Rey’s scornful opinion, but she can’t fault their choice in climbing aids. She goes up to the first step: with her high shoes, that lifts her head above all but the tallest people. Maya is definitely sticking up above the crowd.

Finn is quietly panicking beside her, but Rey just twists her body back and forth so Maya can scan the crowd. Unless the girl’s been dropped off here—unless she’s been left like Rey was—Rey takes in a deep, shaky breath. She’s not panicking, she doesn’t panic, but she is liable to go into full fight-or-flight mode if she doesn’t get a grip here.

It doesn’t take long. A petite woman with disheveled black hair and a Tetris t-shirt bursts out of the crowd, and Maya lurches her whole body forward, further tugging Rey’s wig.

“Aunt Rose!” she exclaims, as the woman practically _skids_ to a halt in front of Rey, reaching her arms up towards the girl.

Maya’s reaction is enough confirmation for Rey, who detaches the girl from her neck and swings her down into her aunt’s arms.

“ _Maya,_ ” the woman said, clutching her very tightly, then setting her briskly on her feet. “Maya, _what did I say_? You have to stay next to me.”

Rey steps down from the ladder, adjusting her headpiece. Maya seems chastised, hanging her head in front of her aunt, who has crouched down to her level and whose hands are trembling very slightly.

Did anyone ever shake like that for worry of her? No, what a stupid train of thought to go down—

“Thank you so much!” Rey comes out of her thoughts as a warm hand clutches her arm. Finn has likewise been seized. “She’s brave but shy, if you guys hadn’t been in those costumes, she might have wandered for a long time. Oh, I’m Rose—” Rey awkwardly shakes Rose’s hand and smiles weakly.

“Maya, what do you say to them for helping you?” Rose addresses the girl, who is now holding onto a loop in Rose’s cargo pants.

“Thank you,” she whispers, the tears back in her voice again.

“You’re welcome,” Rey says, raising her hand and wiggling her fingers at Maya. The girl scrubs her eyes with her fist and nods rapidly, then buries her face back in Rose’s leg.

“Hey,” says Finn, shrugging off his quiver and digging out a plastic baggie with a bunch of stickers in it. He’d printed a bunch, and had mostly handed them out to high schoolers outside the artists’ alley, fielding questions about linework and printing costs. “Do you want a sticker? I have stickers for She-Ra, Bow, Glimmer, and Catra.”

“Are you rewarding her for wandering away?” Rose asks, a bit of indignation in her voice. Finn pauses. Rey presses her lips together, amused. Her heartrate is steadying.

“Oh. I mean, uh, why don’t you ask if it’s okay for you to have a sticker?”

“Do you have a sticker of Hordak?” Maya asks, lifting her head and focusing on the bag in Finn’s hands.

“Um, no,” Finn says. Rose is rolling her eyes, but smiling.

“I want Catra, then.”

“ _May_ I have Catra, _please_ ,” Rose corrects. Maya repeats after her aunt, and grins a smile with one missing tooth upon being handed a sticker with a chibi Catra face. She sticks it to her shirt carefully, smoothing the fabric flat.

Rey returns the ladder to the booth from whence it came—the proprietors hadn’t even noticed—and walks back to Finn.

“I really can’t thank you enough,” Rose is saying to Finn. “That was the longest few minutes of my life, I swear.”

“Rey is the one she spotted,” Finn demurs. “And it makes sense to go up to characters she recognized.”

“I know you aren’t really Adora,” Maya tells Rey. Rey can’t help but smile broadly at her. The girl, sensitive as she is, didn’t stay cowed for long.

“Uh, I was going to just step out of the con for a second and drop her off with her dad. You guys should come to lunch with us. It’s the least I can do.” Rose has one hand firmly around Maya’s and texts with the other. “Well, I guess you probably have con stuff, huh?”

“No,” Finn says quickly. “Actually we had an afternoon that wasn’t super booked, which is why we were wandering here. Might be nice to get some fresh air for a second.” He turns to Rey. “What do you think, Rey?”

“Uh, whatever is fine.” Rey had not been planning to leave. She’s in con mode, and doesn’t need to eat until tonight. But, they really don’t have any must-attend panels for the afternoon. “Yeah, I’m down.”

“Okay, wonderful,” Rose enthuses, still texting. “I just let Ben know we’re on our way!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Logging on to post for the first time since Rogue One came out...
> 
> I have a very vague plan for this. No promised update schedule, sorry. I may up the rating depending on where the story goes. It kind of has a gentle fun tone for now but it will explore slightly darker material. Possibly also sex.
> 
> Yes, Rey and Finn are doing She-Ra (2018) cosplay because I love it, I'm not sorry.
> 
> 2014 is like the last time I went to DragonCon. If I make any egregious geographical errors, I guess let me know? Shoutout to the ATL.


	2. Chapter 2

The four of them walk a few blocks away, far enough that the “sweating cosplayer” quotient of the sidewalk traffic is a little lighter than parade-heavy, but not so far that Rey and Finn will get odd looks. Rey is quietly thankful. It’s one thing to hit up every bar from here to Atlantic Station with a passel of other nerds once the sun goes down, and frankly having a bunch of anime characters show up to order burgers is probably not the strangest thing that happens in any given McDonald’s in this city daily, but she doesn’t want to sit down for lunch with strangers and not have a couple other weirdos also in sight. Safety in numbers, and all that.

“Do you live in town?” Rose asks. She’s talkative, bouncing between engaging Maya and talking about the con.

“Yeah,” Finn says. “Rey and I have been coming to DragonCon since our sophomore year of college.” He doesn’t mention their first year, before either of them had had bank accounts, much less money to spend on convention passes.

“What are you studying?” Rose looks over their outfits. “I mean, you could probably be in costume design if you made your own clothes.”

Finn snorts. “Well, I went to art school, and Rey’s an engineer, so between the two of us I guess we could.”

“Oh wow,” Rose exclaims, and launches into something about design. It’s cool, really—the psychology of negative space in industrial settings—but Rey is starting to space out. Her feet hurt. It’s the price of cosplay, and normally she’d ignore it without issue, but the day is viciously hot, and heat shimmers up from the street and down off the buildings. The pain from her cheap, heavily modified boots is the pain of her bare, bruised feet on hot cement. The baking, humid city air is just as hot as the unshaded parking lot where she’d been collecting aluminum cans into bags.

God _damn_ it. Rey wipes her face on the cloak. It’s just acrylic, and scratchy at that, but she barely cares. She remembers why she didn’t want to walk outside to a different panel. August in Atlanta is unlike anything, and not in a good way. She focuses on Maya, who is walking steadily next to Rose, but maybe looks like she’s flagging? Rey’s hands itch to pick her up. She’s too little to handle the heat. She’s probably going to get a sunburn, end up with an IV and heat shock.

Rose stops outside a shadowy little restaurant and Rey sighs in relief. If she gets a glass of water, maybe she can truly calm down.

The A/C inside isn’t especially good, but the humidity is much lower, and Rey will take it. Her sweat is literally soaking her. She has on a sports bra and a cotton tank under the tight polyester fabric of She-Ra’s costume, but there are still sweat spots on her torso. At least Finn’s costume has that bare midriff.

Rey’s eyes are still adjusting to the inside of the place when Maya starts and rushes to a table against the wall.

“Dad!”

An incongruously large man is sitting there, legs extended about halfway through the room. Maya runs directly into him, pressing her hands on his thigh and sucking in an excited breath. The string of words that falls out of her mouth is too quick for Rey to catch.

“This is Maya’s dad, Ben.”

Rose is not Maya’s aunt on her dad’s side, then. Rose is Asian, petite with a round face and cute features. Ben is white, obviously tall, and his long face is interrupted with sprays of freckles and a big nose and mouth. He’s looking just at Maya, not over at the adults, and Rey takes him in for a moment.

She stands by her assessment that he is overlarge. Not just long-limbed and broad, but his demeanor suggests someone who spills out into the world maybe too much. He holds his arms close to his body, as if he might accidentally knock the table over, or the building. He is handsome, with long black hair and broad shoulders. Rey looks down at her sweat-stained costume and rolls her eyes at herself. Maybe she’s glad she’s not wearing a costume that bares her whole stomach.

“She got lost?” The man has picked his head up and is staring at Rose. His face is still, but Rey swallows at the burn in his eyes.

“She wandered off for a minute,” Rose says, her own voice dipping back into distress. “I panicked but she didn’t.” She waves her arm at Rey and Finn. “She found some heroes who could help her out. That’s why I brought them. I want to buy them lunch.”

“I’ll get it,” he says, tugging Maya into his lap. His eyes move back and forth between Rey and Finn, searching. Then he turns back to his daughter. “Maya, you have to stay close when there’s lots of people.”

“I didn’t mean to,” she replies. Safely in her parent’s arms, she doesn’t seem even a little upset anymore. “I just was playing a game. Look, I got a sticker.”

“You and your games,” Ben says, but just presses his face to Maya’s hair. He says nothing to Finn or Rey.

Rose pulls out the chair next to him, not disturbed in the slightest, and gestures at the other two to Rey and Finn.

The lunch is interesting. Rose carries the conversation, while Ben doesn’t say much of anything. Rey guzzles down a glass of ice water and just watches him and Maya. He has a blank face, except for when his daughter tilts her head up to say something to him. Then he smiles, just a little. Maya looks like him, though her skin is closer to Rose’s golden brown than his freckled ivory.

Finn and Rose are talking about the aesthetics of Miyazaki movies. Rey has only seen a few, and to her ‘aesthetic’ is a thing people make on tumblr. Or maybe on Instagram.

She turns her focus back to Maya. She can’t talk art, and she doesn’t have the faintest clue of what to say to Ben, but she knows at least one thing about the little girl.

“Who’s your favorite character in She-Ra?”

Maya stuffs a French fry into her mouth and starts talking anyway.

“Well, at first Adora was my favorite. Also Mermista because I love swimming. But I like Hordak because I love his face!” She sketches with her hands in front of her own face, indicating a skull mask. “And he’s an alien, I love aliens.”

“Do you know a lot about aliens?” Rey asks. The chicken sandwich she ordered isn’t bad. The lettuce is actually crisp. The food is helping her stay grounded. Maybe she didn’t eat enough for breakfast, and that’s why she freaked out earlier.

“In stories. We haven’t seen any real aliens on Earth yet,” Maya tells Rey, slightly condescending. Rey feels her mouth tug into a half smile. She flicks her eyes up to Ben and nearly chokes. He’s staring at her, dark eyes somehow both open and unreadable. His impassive face is completely still, but she can’t help but stare back at him. There’s something in his eyes, just below what she can see, and without a conscious thought, Rey wants to know what that something is.

She swallows with a suddenly dry throat and takes a sip of water. It’s like he’s hypnotized her—she still can’t look away from his gaze. Has it been two seconds? A few minutes?

“Maya loves space,” he says, in a low voice that Rey can nearly feel in her chest. She tears her eyes away from his and shoves her sandwich back into her mouth, nodding. Finn is still saying something about the emotionality of water on film. Good. He didn’t notice her forebrain fully shut down after making eye contact with one man.

“Do you want to be an astronaut?” It’s the question every kid is asked, supposedly. No one ever asked her, but she was a pretty vicious little kid, to be fair.

“No.” For once, Maya doesn’t offer any more information, just continues to eat and stares across the room.

“Thank you,” Ben says.

“Huh?” Rey says, eloquently.

“Maya said you were the one who helped her.”

“Oh, yeah. Right. Of course, what else was I gonna do? Leave her?” Rey drops her free hand to her knee and digs her nails into her skin, feeling a shiver try to work its way up her body. _Say something else._ “Besides, it comes with the territory, right?” She gestures to her costume. “Can’t dress up like Superman and not commit to stopping evil geniuses, and all that.” She’s not dressed like Superman, nor were there any bad guys involved in Maya’s wanderings, but surely he’s intelligent enough to parse her garbage. He gets it.

“Hero in uniform and everything,” he says. There’s a twist to his words, but Rey doesn’t know where.

“In a cheap wig, more like.” She adjusts the crown again. She’ll duck into the bathroom before they head back to the con and redo it all. She and Finn might not be borderline professional cosplayers who drop thousands on costumes, but when they go all the way, they go all the way. If she didn’t want the wig to look passable, she wouldn’t wear it at all.

“She loves that show,” Ben said. “I had to do her hair like Entrapta for months.” He adjusts the little braid on the back of Maya’s head, making her turn back to look at him.

“I’m tired,” she says.

“You can get a head start on napping in the car, okay?” Ben scoops the remainder of Maya’s fries into his mouth. “Rose, we’re gonna go.”

Rose and Finn break off their conversation, remembering the rest of them are at the table. Finn looks sort of dumbstruck, and Rey is amused. She’s going to give him so much shit for this little crush.

“Rey, Rose is probably gonna hang with us tomorrow,” Finn says. “She’s also interested in the panel on colonialism and sci-fi!” So. Much. Shit.

“Cool,” Rey says. Rose smiles at her. She does seem sweet. It’ll be nice, for Finn to have a friend besides her. He gets lonely differently than she does.

Ben throws some bills on the table—he’s quick, and they’re half hidden by his tray, but Rey has been poor for too long not to realize he’s paying their bill with a bare minimum tip. She digs her wallet out of her bag.

“Let me get my own,” she says. Maya’s clothes are clean but not fancy. Ben is wearing a black t-shirt that’s faded to a dark green and worn at the shoulders.

“No—” Rose bats her cash away and scoops up Ben’s, shoving it into his free hand. “Dumbasses. This is all my fucking fault.”

“Don’t fucking swear in front of Maya,” Ben hisses. Rey snorts, but notices Ben tighten his jaw and pocket the money.

“Hey, Darren, can you run my card?” Rose calls out. The kid who’d brought their food visibly startles that she’s remembered his name, but comes over anyway. Rey eats the last of Finn’s fries, swiping up the ranch that’s smeared on her plate. “Great, thanks.”

Ben stands, propping Maya on his hip. She’s sleepy, leaning her head against his chest. His size makes her look tiny, where she’d been long-legged when Rey lifted her.

“Thanks again,” he says, nodding to Rey and Finn. Rey looks back at him, managing to jerk her head up and down. “See you, Rose.”

“Yup, Thursday, I have it written down.” She stands too and takes Maya from him, giving the girl a squeeze. “Hey, little seashell, don’t wander off, okay? Your dad and I need you.”

Rey has to look away and wipe her hands fastidiously with a napkin as Maya hugs her back. She feels like _she_ needs a nap, though she should be re-energized between the sandwich, the A/C, and the ice water. Her heart feels wrung out.

“Bye, Rey! Bye, Bow!” Maya, back in Ben’s arms, waves from a foot away.

Rey waves back, rather timidly.

“Bye,” she manages to say with a steady voice, then grabs her bag and rushes to the bathroom.

Thank fuck, it’s not one where you have to ask for the key. Rey locks the door and bends over the sink, wetting a paper towel and pressing it to her eyes. Her sinuses are suddenly burning. She blows her nose, letting a sob escape her. _No._ She puts her weight on her toes and feels the blisters her shoes are giving her burn. She pinches hard between her eyes and breathes slowly, pushing down the emotions that have been bubbling up in the toxic witch’s cauldron of her heart.

After a moment, she pulls off her wig and crown to redo the cap. It takes a few moments of concentration and digging for an extra bobby pin in her bag, but when she’s done, She-Ra is staring back at her over the sink, and there’s not a trace of red in her eyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Did I think about Rey's parental issues in any meaningful way before I made Ben a parent in this fic? No, I actually didn't, because I had a different issue to focus on. This is good though, because we'll be working through Rey's and Ben's issues. 
> 
> Apologies to actual cosplayers on any fabric screwups, I am working off very limited knowledge. I can sew plain woven cotton and nothing else.
> 
> As always, comments = love.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's alcohol consumption throughout this chapter. If that's something you don't want to read, I'll put a summary of plot points at the end notes.

Rose is an electrician who spends her free time reading architecture and art blogs, it turns out. She has a lot of opinions on the design of the buildings going up left and right, commenting on every construction and renovation site they pass. Rey isn’t capable of designing anything that doesn’t move, so she can’t contribute to Finn and Rose’s conversation about gentrification, but once it swings over to fictional spaceships, she’s a little more comfortable. It’s not even four yet, and the summer sun is still blazing. Talk of spaceships has Rey swinging back into con mode.

“Guys, I know a few people who are holding an after-party at an apartment tonight. Cheaper than clubbing, I think they just want a few bucks to make back the cost of vodka or whatever.” Rose is texting while she talks. “And like, certified creep-free.”

“We’ll definitely come!” Finn says, then glances at Rey. “Right, Rey?”

“Yeah,” she agrees. By the evening, she’ll be ready to party.

By evening, after the three of them leave a first-floor ballroom packed full of half-drunk nerds dancing to a mediocre Death Cab For Cutie rip-off singing about electromagnetism, Rey is ready for fresh air. Unfortunately, there’s none to be had on the sidewalk. Possibly it’s below eighty degrees, but Rey needs to see the heat index. There’s still a bit of light in the sky, and the streetlights cut through the blue haze of the sweltering air. Every mosquito in the city is out—there was a thundershower yesterday afternoon. The compression biking shorts of her costume have been sweated through multiple times now, but she barely notices with the pain in her feet. It might be nice to lie down in front of the fan in her room.

“I’m kind of tired,” she tells Rose and Finn. “Where is this party?”

“Just in Midtown!” Rose says quickly. “Here, chug this.” She produces a half-full bottle of blue Powerade. Rey knocks it back, not feeling especially powered. It’s lukewarm. “Perfect. Now. Here.”

She steers them into an overcrowded bar packed with con attendees and worms her way through the patrons. It’s impressive, how the force of her personality causes the crowds to part before her, like grass bending in front of an elephant. Rey watches as she gets a bartender’s attention and returns with three large shots and lime slices.

“This will get us there,” she says, distributing them. Finn doesn’t hesitate. Rey is a little irritated that he ignored her statement about being tired, but Rose is right. She just needs a little buzz and she’ll be back where she should be, out of this funk.

It’s definitely shooting tequila, and she bites into the lime with a grimace as the liquor hits her stomach.

It does the trick. She’s pleasantly buzzed as they walk to the MARTA station and pack onto a train, and eats a granola bar from her bag while she and Finn make a game of guessing what animes inspired the outfits of various other commuters. Her feet don’t hurt anymore. Rose is putting her hair into a bun and applying mascara blindly, swaying with the movement of the train.

“Do you cosplay?” Finn asks her.

“Uh-uh. Can’t sew, and there’s not exactly a surplus of short Vietnamese women in the shows I like.” She shrugs, and clicks the mascara closed. “I mean, even for Halloween parties I just put on a cape and fangs, then tell people I’m dressed as a capitalist.”

Rey snorts. Rose is funny, in a snappy kind of way.

“I’ll make you something good for this Halloween,” Finn tells her. Finn likes Rose. This is fine with Rey, and will be even when she’s sober.

“Oh damn, friendship verified,” Rose says.

“We’re going to crash frat parties at like, every campus. Hey! You should be Glimmer. Then we can really blow people’s minds as a group.” Finn gets very enthusiastic when tipsy. Those had been large shots, nearly doubles, and two prior meals weren’t much padding. Rey can practically feel it sloshing around in her stomach.

“Yes. All we need is a unicorn.” Rose giggles. “Oh my god, please do. It’ll make Maya so happy when I take her trick or treating.”

Rey wants another drink, and never mind the sloshing.

The train stops at the Midtown station.

“This is us!” They disembark with a crowd of students. Rey recognizes half of them. It’s not far from her and Finn’s apartment, but instead of veering east into the mostly residential areas, they veer south.

The walk to an apartment in a nice building isn’t long, and the sky is finally dark. Rey feels great, and even dances a little when they’re stopped at a crosswalk, to Finn and Rose’s delight.

The apartment has a buzzer, but Rose just yells “Jessika!” into the intercom and the lock clicks.

Rose doesn’t knock when they reach a door labeled 33, just turns the handle. A blast of noise spills into the hallway. There are a lot of people packed into the tiny space, and electronica blaring.

Rey is almost immediately handed a blue cup full of blue liquid and pointed towards a table piled with Domino’s boxes. She sniffs the cup. Tequila, some kind of fruit juice, and a bunch of Blue Curacao: a classic. She takes a slice of mushroom and black olive and a gulp of the drink. It’s all good. It feels like being in college again.

The party is mostly girls, mostly in costume. Jessika, the hostess, is a tall slim Asian woman dressed as Sailor Mars, and she is both entirely wasted and coherent. It’s impressive.

“I’m telling you, the only point of rebooting some of these tired old series is to make them catered to the feminine gaze,” she’s yelling, while half dancing to CHVRCHES as it blasts through the high-quality speakers of her living room. “But you have to trick corporate media into giving you money to produce them. It’s so fucking dumb, it’s like they don’t even realize women have money! Fuck, they get it in Korea!”

Rey ducks to the side as Rose starts shouting back about exploitation by record labels, but Jessika is waving her hand to cut her off.

“I’m talking about narrative art. Like She-Ra!” She has a strong grip. “It is an act of reclamation, at least in the West. A character that’s not all about tits!” She gestures at Rey’s chest, nearly sloshing a sizable amount of pink wine onto the costume. Rey finishes the crust of her pizza and keeps an eye on the drink Jessika is using to punctuate her sentences.

“Well, pop idols have entirely constructed narratives—” Rose isn’t conceding. Rey can’t believe they can talk about the politics of art while this wasted. It’s like the parties she’s been to where drunken structural engineering students discuss bridge supports at the tops of their lungs and complicate flip cup with extra physics. She shrugs Jessika off and returns to the pizza, topping her cup off with more blue punch. Maybe this is what art students yell about.

Next to the counter full of drinks and the table, a little scrum of people have started dancing, with varying degrees of talent. Rey joins them, feeling the urge to move now that she’s had a drink. People are handsy in a friendly sort of way, not in the way that men in clubs are. It reminds Rey of sorority parties, the clusters of sharp-elbowed girls who would form safe pockets on dance floors. Dancing in a group like that is like dancing alone; Rey can be uninhibited and unworried, but also feed on the energy of the crowd. This is perfect. She finds a place between two girls dressed as Starfleet officers and loses herself.

-

The party isn’t truly winding down by one, but Rey has danced herself sober and tired. It’s a good tired, and she’s having ice water while she watches Finn and Jessika get into a pushup contest, but she wants to leave soon. They’ve probably missed the last train, but they’re close enough to home that an Uber won’t break the bank. Rey’s feet are numb. She probably is good to walk, thanks to that.

Rose leans on the wall next to her, flushed. Rey is pleased that, when she thinks about it, she is glad Finn gets along so well with her. Without his classmates, he needs more people to be with, and without her homework, Rey needs more space.

“I’m so glad you guys came,” Rose says. She’s switched to water, too. “Finn has my number so we can find each other tomorrow.”

“Thank you for inviting us.” Rey smiles. “I haven’t danced in a while, that was fun.”

“Jessika can throw a fucking party, huh? And of course you’re invited! Even if you guys weren’t like the two coolest people in the city, I owe you my goddamned life.” She takes a sip of her water. “Gotta put a leash on that kid. She just gets distracted easily, you know?”

“I guess,” Rey says. “What age is she?”

“Five. More like five and a bit now.” Rose digs her phone out of her pocket. “This is a picture of her first day of kindergarten.”

Maya is squinting into the camera, her hair parted into two braids. She has a little backpack and lunchbox, and the same red sneakers. She isn’t smiling, but she isn’t afraid. Rey says as much.

“She went to pre-K, so school isn’t scary for her. And she can read and knows her letters, so it’s not hard either.”

“It’s not really supposed to be hard at that age, right?” Rey was in special ed when she was in elementary school, due to her _issues_. At five she couldn’t sit still for more than a minute, much less write her ABCs.

“Yeah, I guess. Ben is really smart so she’ll be smart too.” Rose swallows and puts her phone away. Her mouth works.

“Is Ben your brother?” Rey asks quietly. She thinks he isn’t, but he could be, and Rose looks like she wants to say more but doesn’t know how. Rose huffs a quick breath out through her nose.

“Uh, no, heh, that would be something. Maya is my sister’s kid. She, uh, well, Maya was too little to even really remember her…” Rose’s voice cracks and she crushes the cup in her hands, spilling water onto the kitchen floor. Rey watches it pool into little droplets.

Over on the other side of the room, the pushup count is approaching one hundred and rising in volume and pitch.

“What was her name?”

“Paige,” Rose says, her other hand clenched around something under her shirt. Rey sees a thin black cord at the back of her neck. “Fuck, I miss her a lot.” Her voice is a ragged, wet whisper.

If she were Finn, she would reach out and hug Rose, but Rey isn’t a natural hugger. She’s a fixer, and she can’t fix Paige from being dead. So she takes Rose’s cracked cup and puts it in the trash, and gets her a new one, with ice.

Then she goes to get Finn from where he’s groaning on the floor so they can get home by two.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Summary: Rose invites Rey and Finn to a party where Rey and Rose talk a little. Rose shares that Maya is her sister's daughter, and that Paige is dead. Rey does a bit of suppressing her feelings in this chapter.
> 
> This will eventually have a plot and everything! These first chapters are kind of a little prologue, a way to set up Rey's state of being. They won't be at DragonCon the whole story.
> 
> Thanks for reading :)


	4. Chapter 4

Rey wakes on Monday morning not very hungover, but with blisters all over her feet. She swallows ibuprofen with her morning oatmeal, and offers some to Finn when he emerges from his room, actually very hungover.

“Ugh,” he says. “My _arms_ hurt. Did I really do a pushup contest with a girl in an anime costume?”

“Yup,” Rey informs him, scraping her spoon around the edges of her bowl. “Don’t worry, I’m sure there will be lots of chances for you today to show off your guns for Rose in a way you’ll remember.”

“Hey!” he says, fake outraged, but ducks his head down to carefully pour himself a bowl of cereal. “She’s pretty cool, right? Kinda political, though.”

“You don’t like that?” Rey washes her bowl and puts it in the drainboard. “I mean, you were talking about gentrification and stuff with her.”

“Like, I have opinions but I’m not used to just mentioning them to people. She just blurts out what she thinks. What if we were totally against her opinions? That’s a good way to get into fights.”

“Well, maybe she’ll turn you into one of those people who like talking about it.” Rey knows how fiercely Finn believes in things, but she also knows that he spent most of his life agreeing with everyone he encountered as a matter of survival. “Don’t be afraid to disagree with her, either!”

“I just met her yesterday!” Finn adds milk to his cereal and immediately starts shoveling it in his mouth in his race to keep it from getting even slightly soggy. Rey knows better than to try to talk to him while he tries to defeat the porosity of Cheerios, so she takes a shower.

The hot water both burns and soothes her feet, and at least one blister bursts while she washes her hair. She grits her teeth and scrubs her feet as vigorously as she can bear. She has too many scars and problems with her feet to risk an infection, especially since she’s currently without a job that provides health insurance.

Afterwards, she sits on the edge of the tub and applies band-aids to her clean feet, then puts on soft socks. She’s not doing a real cosplay today, just leggings and a minidress with a Star Trek pin. Also known as hungover final day cosplay, but it works.

Finn isn’t dressed up either, but he’s opted for a rather tight button-down instead of a t-shirt proclaiming his allegiance to the Order of the Phoenix, and his nicer jeans and shoes. Rey gives him a look.

“What?” he huffs. “Come on, I want to be early for that panel, and it’s going to be a popular one.”

-

The con winds down over the course of the day: it’s not as packed as the weekend, and every hour, people depart to catch the train to the airport. The locals, Rey and Finn included, and Rose with them, trawl the artists’ alley in search of things discounted by artists not wanting to carry them back.

Rey finds herself entranced with a painting of a castle that, on closer inspection, is also a crashed spaceship. The background is a sky and sea grey with an encroaching storm, and the metal of the spaceship glimmers dully under the rock of the castle built over it. The artist has others—one spaceship half buried in a dune, turned into a marketplace inhabited by little desert elves, and one tree trunk being outfitted with rockets. The latter two are charming, but the first is haunting. She buys a print for thirty-five dollars and holds it very carefully.

“That one is my favorite in the series.” The artist is a little old lady with her wiry white hair clipped almost to nothing. She wears enormous glasses on an ornate chain. “Here,” she opens a portfolio and begins rifling through it. “Take a look at this.” She hands Rey some loose papers.

It’s sketches, all in dark pencil—one of two figures dueling at the gates of the castle, one of a tall, shadowed figure in medieval clothes looking out a window bordered in worn-out control panels, one of a girl sheltering from rain under a ragged solar shield. Rey’s mouth falls open.

“I make landscapes, tableaus. But if no one lives in them in my head, the painting feels empty.”

Rey looks at the grey castle original again.

“This still feels empty. I mean, it’s beautiful. But it gives me a lonely feeling.”

The artist adjusts her glasses and smiles slightly.

“Well, I only imagined these two being there, not a whole village like the others.” She puts her portfolio away. Rey holds out the sketches. “Oh no, keep them. I have many, and what am I going to do with them?”

“I can’t possibly,” Rey protests. They might be simple studies for mood, but they feel precious to her. The faceless figures hiding from the rain and dueling shimmer with movement. She can’t believe the artist doesn’t paint portraits or action scenes.

“I bought a lot of art too. Gotta lighten my load or I’ll be charged a fee from the airline.” She pats Rey’s hand. A dismissal, but not dismissive. “You sensed the feeling of the place right away. The studies belong with you.”

Rey eventually slides them into the plastic behind her new print, trying not to smear them. She’ll frame them and hang them next to the print itself. They’ll go in her room, so she can look up at them when she works and imagine the windswept, twice-wrecked ruin and its vibrant occupants.

She rejoins Finn and Rose, who like the painting and think it’s cool as hell that she’s been given the sketches too, but don’t gasp over it, transfixed, like she did. Finn has a print himself: a glossy metallic semi-abstract curling design in shades of red and orange that reminds her of a picture Rey’s seen of the inside of the Hagia Sophia: a script she can’t read. Rose is cooing over a little zine-sized book full of the adventures of an alien that looks like a hare-horse. Apparently there’s a webcomic.

That night, Rey looks at the little label on the back of the print. _Maz Kanata, Takodana Studios._ There’s an address, too: somewhere in Minnesota. She imagines a serene blue lake, and considers the wildness of the painting. There is no website or social media handle, which is strange, even for an older artist. Maybe Ms. Kanata needs a website designed. Considering the gift of the sketches, Rey would have to offer a discount, but she doesn’t mind the idea. Of course, she’ll have to mail a physical letter to contact the woman. Not likely to happen, if she’s serious.

Before she goes to bed, she takes a bottle of rubbing alcohol, sterilizes a needle, and punctures all the blisters on her feet. They’re not that bad, but she’s tired of the pain. Better to break them now than tomorrow walking around. She knew this would happen when she got the boots, and she did it anyway. She can live with the consequences.

-

Over the course of the month, Rose becomes good friends with Finn. Rey supposes that she is also good friends, or at least friends, with Rose, but she can’t exactly tell. Finn is her only friend, and while she has moderated a lot since she was eighteen, she’s never heard anything good about her qualities as a team player. In fact, in the ‘peer feedback’ section of her grade on the final project for her design class, one of her partners had written that she was “a railroading pedant who expects others to read her mind, but sensitive to criticism” and the other, “Rey is perfectly willing to work her ass off, but I’d rather have a lazy partner with a modicum of emotional intelligence. Even for Tech she is mental. At least she’s a genius.”

Rose seems to like her, though, and Rey likes her too. She installs and removes wiring at construction sites for a living, and jokes that her flipped-out hair is a result of being electrocuted one too many times. Usually she shows up to their duplex in the evening, hammers on the door with the heel of her hand, and bursts inside with a bag of takeout.

The first morning that Rey gets up to see Rose’s work boots still at the door, it’s a little awkward. Finn and she have lived together for two years now, and neither of them have had anyone sleep over. Rey isn’t certain that Finn has invited anyone to visit, ever. Maybe some of his school friends? She can’t remember. Rose, who’s usually completely comfortable, blushes and mutters while Finn makes coffee for all three of them.

“I’m going for an interview in Inman Park. Can you drop me off on your way to your site?” Rey sees Finn and Rose both relax at her businesslike calm.

“Yeah, of course,” Rose says quickly, smiling. “If you can stand my driving.” She has a Civic hatchback that probably dates from the twentieth century, with a backseat half filled with wire cutters, electrical tape, and other accoutrements that Rey can’t name. Once she gets to the interview, she has to brush plaster dust off her black pants, but it’s okay.

Rey is familiar with the feeling of being replaced. Finn doesn’t do it directly, and he doesn’t even do it as a choice. He likes Rose, and though she hasn’t had the experience, Rey knows that when people fall in love, other people get pushed aside. It was only a matter of time, when she thinks about it. Finn has so many fewer problems than she does, she should have seen this coming.

She’s no longer the first person Finn texts or shouts to when he’s excited, but she has two friends now, so it’s a fair price to pay. She’s in a group text that isn’t related to a school project. As promised, Finn is working on a group Halloween costume for them, and three people does open the door for themed outfits a lot wider.

Rey builds several websites on commission, which keeps her in rent and food, and is not offered jobs by the firms that interview her.

By the time they reach October, Rey has barely thought about Rose’s niece. She’s not at their apartment often enough to share many pictures or updates—she and Finn go to plays and movies, which Rey has trouble affording and doesn’t want either of them to pay for—and Rey tunes out the few anecdotes she recounts. Rey doesn’t want to hear a thing about anyone’s children, unless it’s that they need tutoring in math for at least twenty dollars an hour. The sticky, raw feeling interacting with Maya gave her is largely forgotten, as is Ben’s dark stare over the four-top covered in sandwich trays.

Things change when Rose breaks her ankle.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the last of the short "intro" chapters with Rey backstory. In subsequent chapters, I promise actual Rey/Ben interactions, and something of a plot, even. This is sort of a weird cross between curtain fic and a real story, so the pacing is all over the place.
> 
> I'm also super busy in my real life, so my chapter buffer is basically gone now. Updates will be less frequent. Sorry about that.
> 
> Comments are much appreciated and I cherish them.


	5. Chapter 5

It is technically Rey’s fault that Rose is sitting and complaining in the ER. Sort of. Rey, egged on by Finn, was demonstrating that she could do the choreography for “Good Kisser” on the narrow edge of a planter in their neighbors’ yard. Rose, not one to miss out on fun, jumped up beside her and joined in. However, Rey had spent high school fervently devoted to the step team and the hours of practice it meant she could spend away from whatever her ‘home’ was at the time.

Rey reflects that of the things she can make look easy, ‘acrobatic choreography’ is moving up to match ‘put together an engine’ in terms of bystander danger. Once her foster father nearly electrocuted himself “correcting” a repair she’d made to his bike. It’s one of her few funny memories, but she doesn’t want to open the door to all the other memories, and focuses her attention back on Rose.

“How long can it take, really?” Rose frets, drumming her fingers on the vinyl bench she’s occupying. “I mean, they just put it in the right place and then put the cast on, right?” The nurse elevated and iced her ankle, so she looks rather undignified and pitiable trying to reassure herself.

“A long time,” Finn predicts. “I mean, I think a doctor has to set it, and broken ankle isn’t exactly a priority injury.” Rey agrees.

Rose makes a sound of frustration that puts Rey in mind of a snorting horse, then says, “It’s already five. I was supposed to watch Maya for Ben tonight starting at seven.”

“There’s no way you’re getting out of here before nine,” Finn says, and fishes Rose’s charger out of her purse. “Ugh, why can’t you have an iPhone like the rest of us?”

Rey watches as Rose makes a call, presumably to Ben.

“Hey Ben. Yeah. So, I’m in the ER. No! It’s just a broken ankle, nothing serious, just a pain in the ass. No. I have friends here. But I’m not sure I’ll be able to get to your place by seven.” She messes with the ends of her hair. “Well, probably I definitely won’t get there, honestly.” A huff of irritation. “Yes, ‘probably definitely,’ Ben. Can I venmo you so you can get a babysitter and not have to cancel the class?”

Rose turns her focus over to Finn after listening for a few moments. Rey picks at her shoelaces.

“Hey Finn, you wanna watch Maya? I’ll pay you.”

“I mean, you don’t have to pay me,” Finn hedged. “But how are you going to get home? I don’t want to leave you.”

When Rey got the flu their freshman year and could barely make it down the hallway of her dorm to fill her water bottle, Finn had camped out on her roommate’s futon and stubbornly carried her when she needed to use the bathroom for two straight days. It’s thankfully a haze in Rey’s memory, the helplessness blurred by fever and pain, but she knows that it will be worse than pulling teeth to get Finn to leave Rose’s side. She uncrosses her legs and taps her sneakers on the floor.

“I can watch Maya,” she says, modulating her voice into a higher register to make it a question. “I mean, I don’t have a license, so Finn will have to drive you home.”

“Can you really?” Rose says, eyes wide. “Ben is really picky about who watches her, so of course the people who usually do can’t on short notice, but I know you.”

“Sure,” Rey shrugs.

Rose turns back to her phone, jiggling her unharmed leg.

“Rey will come watch Maya. You met her. Maya already met her. Yes. Obviously.” A sigh. “Okay.” She hangs up.

-

So Rey gets on the MARTA, transfers at Five Points, rides to North Avenue, and then gets on a bus, because fuck the bus ride from Grady to North Avenue. Ben and Maya live on the north side of Old Fourth Ward, in a neighborhood that veers from nice renovated houses surrounded by trees, to dilapidated mid-century homes on small lots, to subsidized apartment buildings. The address from Rose leads her to a single story house with white-painted siding and a brick front. The yard is grass with poorly trimmed bushes at the front of the house.

It’s six-fifteen: Rey has made it with plenty of time. Standing on the sidewalk, she wishes Rose had given her Ben’s number so she could call and say she was there. She doesn’t want to call Rose and play literal Telephone, especially since Rose is possibly getting her ankle set this very moment.

She marches up the cracked cement driveway and up the two steps to the front door, rings the doorbell, and waits.

It takes just long enough that she’s pulled out her phone to confirm the address for the door to open.

“You have brown hair.”

Rey looks up, and up. Ben really is tall. He’s wearing a grey hoodie and black sweatpants, the kind with white stripes down the side. They remind Rey of a dancer’s workout pants: snug enough for movement, loose enough for comfort. She stops looking at his legs and focuses on his face. What was he talking about?

“Oh, yeah. I was wearing a wig before.”

He pulls the door open and gestures for her to come inside. There’s a little shelf to the left with shoes arranged on it: very large men’s shoes and little kids’ shoes. Rey toes off her sneakers and lines them up next to the others.

“Right,” Ben says. He shuts the door and looks at her. His eyes are more intense than she remembered. She thought maybe she had imagined the way he stared her down. She hadn’t.

“Rose is fine,” Rey tells him. “Just annoyed, really.”

“I have no doubt Rose is fine,” he says as Rey pokes her head into what must be the dining room. There’s a round table, half covered in papers, but half in use. Maya is sitting at it, a mostly full plate in front of her. Next to her is an empty seat with what must be Ben’s plate.

“Hi!” she waves at Rey, wiggling in her chair a little. Rey smiles at her.

“This is Aunt Rose’s friend,” Ben says, brushing past Rey and taking his seat.

“I remember. Actually, I met her first.” Maya pierces a bowtie noodle with a fork and chews thoughtfully. Her hair is wet as though she’s washed, and she’s in what Rey judges to be pajamas.

“’Met’ her, right.” Ben looks up from his plate at where Rey stands in the doorway. “Uh. Do you want something to eat?”

“If you have extra, I could eat,” Rey says. She hasn’t eaten since an early lunch, and she is hungry. She won’t ask, but he offered. Offered sort of belatedly, but thinking back to the first time she saw him, social graces aren’t his strong suit. Rey can relate.

Ben goes into the kitchen, clatters around for a moment, and returns with a plate of noodles and sauce, with green beans on the side. He stacks up a couple piles of papers into a larger stack, clearing a space for her.

“Thanks.” Rey digs in. It isn’t bad. The green beans have a slight aftertaste from the can, but there’s some garlic powder or something to help cover it. The noodles aren’t overcooked but pleasantly firm. Better food than Rey has often had.

“Daddy says Aunt Rose broke her leg,” Maya says.

“Well, her ankle,” Rey corrects, finishing her green beans.

“How did she do it? I’ve never broken my bones before.”

“Um, she was dancing and fell.”

Maya twists her mouth as she considers this, poking idly at her green beans.

“She was dancing?” Ben interjects. He’s looking at her almost through the dark bangs that hang into his eyes when his head tilts, but Rey can still see the dark glint of his gaze.

“Well, she was dancing on a narrow beam,” Rey elaborates. Ben chuffs through his nose in a way that might indicate amusement.

“Maya, eat the green beans too,” Ben instructs. “Otherwise, when you’re bigger, you’ll have brittle bones like Aunt Rose.” He looks over at Rey. “Do you…want some more?”

Shit. She’s cleared her plate. She jerks a hand up to her mouth, hoping she hasn’t got tomato sauce on her face.

“Uh, no. Thank you. I, um, just eat fast.”

“Do you want to see my room?” Maya has scooted to the edge of her chair and has an eager look on her face.

“Maya, if you get hungry later, you have to eat green beans before a snack.” Ben reaches out a hand, places it over Maya’s stomach, and gently scoots her back into her chair. “You’ll have plenty of time to show Rey your room.”

His voice is so deep it makes her name sound like a foreign word. Like an animal’s growl, low and breathed into only at the end. She scrapes at the remains of the sauce with her fork, feeling her cheeks flush.

Maya quickly eats her remaining green beans, chewing quickly with her eyes shut. She finishes with a deep gulp of milk and a full body shudder. Rey bites her lip to avoid smiling. It’s charming, though an instinct is making her want to duck, lest someone come into the room and start smacking people for being ungrateful.

Being here is invoking an unsettling mixture of physical sensations. Ben takes the plates into the kitchen.

“I’d love to see your room after dinner,” Rey says to Maya, then startles as Ben comes back and places her plate back in front of her. There’s another serving of noodles and beans on it. “Um.”

“You looked still hungry,” he says. Rey is still hungry, but she makes herself eat this plate at what feels like an agonizingly slow pace, but is probably normal speed. She avoids looking at Ben as much as possible. Why he can make her feel flustered when almost nothing can, she doesn’t know, but she’s starting to resent it.

“I teach a class from seven to ten on Sundays,” Ben says. He’s drinking from a tall water bottle rather than a glass.

“On what?”

“Jiu jitsu.” That explains the workout clothes. “Maya goes to bed at seven thirty on school nights.” This is the part where he explains the routine. Rey babysat a couple of times in high school, when she was new there. She vaguely remembers this being a thing.

“Okay, sounds good.” It sounds a little early, to Rey, but Maya seems a picture of health, so it must be working.

“My cell number and the gym number are on the fridge.” Rey glances over to the kitchen. Another little domestic detail: contact numbers on the fridge. Probably there are school numbers up there too. Maybe Rose’s as well.

“Got it.”

“She already had a shower—”

“Dad did not have a shower!” Maya interjects, holding her nose dramatically. Ben looks over at her, stands, and picks her up around the waist, tucking her head into his armpit while she shrieks and kicks her legs.

“Nooo, that’s yucky!” She’s giggling helplessly though, battering her fists against Ben’s arm. He sets her down after a moment, smiling a little. It’s nice on his serious face, Rey thinks. Her heart is clenching at Maya’s laughter.

She finishes the last of her noodles and breathes through her nose for a few seconds. Maya is riled up, racing through the kitchen with a little shriek, and Ben sits back down.

“I trust Rose, and Rose trusts you,” he says, and Rey realizes this has become a very serious conversation. “Maya is the only thing in the world that I care about.” His eyes are pinning her to the chair.

“I get it,” Rey says calmly, even though she really, really, _really_ doesn’t. She has a shivery sense memory of work-rough hands pulling a comb through her hair, and the image of a little paper pine tree dangling from a rearview mirror. Nothing else: not a house, not a face, not a word. “You don’t have anything to worry about.”

“Okay,” Ben says, and moves his gaze from hers, lifting whatever spell had her paralyzed. “You’re my guest. Help yourself to whatever in the kitchen. There’s nothing special.”

He leaves at six forty-five, a bag over one shoulder, after picking Maya up and hugging her goodnight. Rey hears him lock the door from the outside.

Maya gives Rey a detailed tour of her room, beginning with the stickers of planets on the light switch plate, continuing through each named stuffed animal and plush toy on her half-made bed, and ending with her bookshelf, which is stuffed full of thin, wide children’s books.

“Very nice,” Rey says approvingly.

“We’re learning letters in school, but I already know how to read,” Maya says, and flops onto her bed with an exaggerated sigh.

“Did your dad teach you?”

“Yeah.” She waves a hand at her bookshelf. “I can read like, all of those pretty much.”

Rey pulls one out at random. _Frog and Toad Are Friends._ It looks cute.

“Even this one?”

Maya slithers down her bed and scuttles over to Rey like a crab, then takes the book.

“Yes.”

Rey isn’t even surprised when Maya can read through the whole book, even pausing for effect and doing voices for the characters. At times, the voice she does for the Frog character sounds strikingly like Rose. Does Rose read it with her, or does Ben?

By the time they have finished the first three stories, it is seven twenty. Rey supervises Maya’s brushing of her teeth, helping with squeezing out toothpaste.

“Can you read me a book? Dad or Aunt Rose always read me a book before bed.” Maya is sitting in her bed, under the covers but still upright, and looking expectantly at Rey.

“Um, sure,” Rey agrees. She goes over to the bookshelf and looks for something short. She isn’t sure how Maya wants it read: there are no chairs in the room, and they’d read the previous book sitting on the floor.

“You can sit next to me,” Maya tells her, scooting to the side. Rey perches halfway on the bed and opens the book so Maya can see the pictures.

By the time Rey is done with the tale of the lost girl and the lost bear cub on the mountain, Maya is looking a little sleepier. Perhaps she would fall asleep to a story had Rey thought to turn off the bright overhead light and put on a lamp, but she didn’t, so Rey settles for putting the book back on the shelf while Maya lies down, then walking quietly to the door.

“Good night,” she says softly.

“Good night!” a little voice returns her words, heavy with tiredness. Rey switches off the light and closes the door.

-

She spends a moment to text Rose and Finn.

**Rey**

_Maya went to bed. All is well here._

Rose responds almost immediately.

**Rose**

_It’s super boring here! We’re literally waiting for plaster to dry omg_

_anyway tysm for helping out, I owe you again!!_

_she’s precious, right? Did she try to extend her bedtime? She does that sometimes._

Rey snorts.

**Rey**

_no, not even a little._

**Rose**

_lmao you’re like a new stern person who she can’t wheedle into doing stuff_

**Rey**

_Ugh I hope I didn’t scare her she didn’t seem scared._

**Rose**

_No I just mean she doesn’t know you enough to tease you yet_

**Finn**

_If she wasn’t scared of you in that wig why would she be scared of you now, I ask_

Rey sends a middle finger emoji.

Then she does a little snooping. The house is clean and tidy, and she doesn’t dare even touch the handle of the door to the other bedroom, but she turns on the lights in the kitchen and living room and looks at everything in view.

The papers on the table are mostly just xeroxed handouts of exercise routines and schedules, divided by type. For Ben’s students, Rey assumes, because he shouldn’t need twelve different versions of a “Monday lifting routine.” On a side table rests a child’s backpack with a yellow folder and a little sweater. There isn’t anything decorative in the room unless you count a simple candlestick with spaces for two candles also on the side table. There are little nubs of white wax clinging to it.

The kitchen yields slightly more interesting results. The notes and numbers on the fridge are written in an immaculate hand—well, technically, _printed_ so neatly that they look almost like real typeface. There’s a grocery list lying on the counter that’s actually written in perfect old-fashioned cursive, noting that they need milk, bread, eggs, and veg. The pots from dinner are resting in the drainboard, dry now, and Rey uses that as an excuse to open all the cabinets in order to put them away.

There’s nothing special or distinctive, aside from a couple of coffee mugs with logos that Rey inspects. Guerrera’s Gym, which she presumes is where Ben works; Peachtree Pre-K, clearly Maya-related; Emory University, which is local; one with a small chip on the rim printed with the Army star; First Place in the O4W Labor Day 10K. On a high shelf, Rey finds a tea service printed in blue willow. It’s dusty.

The living room is also low on decoration, but there is a largish bookshelf on one wall, and some photographs set up in front of the books.

Rey swallows.

The pictures are right there for anyone to see, but she wonders if anyone but Ben, Rose, and Maya ever even enters the house.

In a simple metal frame, a picture of Ben with shorter hair, dressed in a suit, and a black-haired woman in a blue dress on his arm. The woman doesn’t look terribly similar to Rose, but there’s a certain determination and ferocity in her eyes and the set of her mouth that is familiar to Rey. They are both smiling, sort of awkwardly, and in the background is what Rey recognizes as a clerk’s office. Their wedding picture, then.

Next to that, another picture of Paige, this time with mussed hair and worn face, in a t-shirt, holding a blanket-wrapped bundle that must be newborn Maya. It’s not in a frame, just leaning against the spine of a book called _Introduction to Attic Greek._ Rey picks it up carefully and turns it over. The printed date says 08 FEB 2013. The same perfect script from the grocery list reads _Paige and Maya, Eisenhower._ Rey sets it back down carefully.

She can’t stop herself from looking at the rest of the pictures. Three little ones in a vertical frame of a baby dressed in a blue onesie and photographed against a white background make her smile, as does a candid one of Paige holding a slightly larger Maya in her lap and smiling at the camera. The final pictures aren’t even developed on film, but are printouts of an email. Paige, a little hard to recognize under a helmet and fatigues, grinning next to three other people also in uniform. They’re all raising little white cups to the camera. The paper is folded over, but Rey can see the last few lines of the email.

_here, like the best chai you could imagine, anywhere you go. I miss you and Maya so much!!! Can’t wait to be back!!! Send more pictures of her!! I will try to videocall soon so I can hear her new WORDS, so proud of her. xoxoxo, Paige_

Fuck. Rey hurries out of the living room and back into the comparatively bloodless kitchen.

Well, what was she expecting? Rose already told her Paige was gone, so does it matter if it was in a car accident or of cancer or by overdose or in a war zone? Rey is also motherless, and does not know whether car accident or choice or drugs or prison or insanity took the woman away. It shouldn’t matter.

It shouldn’t, but it still does, because Rey had no immunization or birth records, no photos in a hospital bed to let her put a face to her mother. She has enough context to know that she was probably left out like trash, that accident alone does not explain her situation. She huddles on a chair in the kitchen and feels a mix of bitter envy and protective grief for Maya wash over her. Maya gets to know that her mother loved and missed her, what Paige’s face looks like. Rey knows in her bones that that will be a bare whisper of cold comfort over the wound inside the girl.

It’s an unwelcome feeling, the envy of knowing Maya has it so much better than she did, and the pain of wishing that the poor girl didn’t have to bear any of it. It is, she realizes, the same feeling she felt when Maya originally found her, dialed up a hundred times stronger. Recognition of the shared loss, even though it seems Rey’s wound gapes larger and deeper, if older and more numbed.

She watches videos on her phone until she hears Ben’s key in the door.

He steps inside, takes off his shoes, and dumps his backpack on one of the chairs. Rey tucks her phone into her pocket and stands.

“Everything went okay here,” she says. Ben’s hair is mussed and clumped, but still somehow looks good. He looks like a commercial for a sports drink or something, not like he’s tired from three hours of exercise.

“Good,” he says. He fidgets for a second, then unzips his backpack and digs out a wallet.

“You don’t usually pay Rose, right?” Rey guesses. Ben doesn’t quite glare at her, but the look he shoots at her is flat and irritated. She holds her hands up in appeasement. “I mean, it’s cool, it’s not like I was working tonight.”

“But you could use the money,” he says, and hands her two twenties. “I’m picking up some more clients next week, don’t worry about it.”

Rey shrugs and puts the money in her pocket. “Okay, but, like, I do favors for my friends, so if you need help again in a pinch, it’s cool.”

“Are we friends?”

She is once again frozen like a deer in high beams as he makes eye contact.

“I mean, I’m friends with Rose, so by the transitive property, I guess,” she manages to say. His lips don’t so much as twitch, but he huffs a breath out through his nose again, which seems to be as close as he gets to laughing. “Thanks for dinner, by the way.”

She should be leaving, catching a bus before it gets too late. _Too late for what?_ It’s not like she has a job to get to at nine o’clock sharp. But she doesn’t want to, staring into his eyes like she’s never seen the color brown before. His eyes were dark before, but with light on them, they’re a warm caramel color. Her insides feel scraped raw, and she imagines that his must be too, thinking of the photos.

“Yeah, no problem.” His eyes drift down her face, then back up. He’s got a very faint bit of stubble on his chin, she notices.

She is noticing _far too much_ about him. She needs to leave. She edges around him, picking up her sneakers and starting to untie the laces. Why didn’t she untie them when she took them off?

“Why was Rose trying to dance on a narrow beam?” Ben is sitting down now, putting some of the papers on the table into his backpack. Rey pauses in her unpicking of her knots, distracted.

“What?”

“You said she fell dancing on a narrow beam, but I can’t imagine her doing that.”

“Um.” This is where she has to admit that she’s the idiot who instigated this. “Well, I was, sort of demonstrating—” _showing off_ “—and Rose thought it was funny I guess.”

“Okay, that sounds like Rose.” Ben looks at her as she ties her shoe while standing on the other foot. “You seem to have better balance.”

Is he looking at her legs? The jeans she’s wearing came from Forever 21 and cost something like four dollars. They fit a little weirdly, but they aren’t threadbare yet.

“Thanks,” she says, switching feet and fumbling at her laces like a child. That might not have been a compliment, actually, now that she thinks about it. It’s not the most polite move to brag about your balance while discussing someone else’s broken ankle. Ben doesn’t say anything, thankfully.

“Do you do any martial arts?”

Rey snaps her head up and puts her foot down.

“No, I used to dance, but I don’t really much these days. I just run and lift a little.”

“I see.”

And Rey, despite having seen Rose get hurt as a consequence of Rey’s need for positive attention, slides into a split for just a moment, bouncing back up with a kick that adds a little flair to a move that’s not as cool in sneakers as it is in heels. The cheap jeans are fortunately stretchy. Her hamstrings are a little less stretchy than ideal, and she hides a wince.

Ben definitely looks down at her legs, now, but she invited him to with that. She feels flushed and awake, and a little awkward; she spins her keys on her finger.

“Well, see you,” she tells Ben.

“I could teach you,” he says. Rey blinks.

“Sorry, what?” His eyes move from her eyes to her body to her legs, then back to her eyes, freezing her yet again.

“If you wanted to get into martial arts. I could teach you,” he repeats, not breaking eye contact.

“Oh.” Rey licks her lips. She isn’t sure what to say. His eyes drop from hers. “Thanks. That’s really nice of you.”

“It’s helpful to have a dance background. Not just the balance and core strength, but the discipline.”

“Discipline is something I could probably stand to get back into my life,” Rey says without thinking, then blushes. She meant that until she gets a job, she ought to wake up at a reasonable hour anyway, but with the likely _obvious_ way she can barely think when she meets his eyes, she shouldn’t speak.

“Mm-hmm,” is all Ben says, thankfully not engaging. “Anyway, thanks.”

“You’re welcome,” Rey says, and means it. “I like Maya a lot.” She fiddles more with her keys and then shoves them in her back pocket. Ben opens the door for her.

“Get home safe,” he says.

“Yup,” Rey replies, and turns north towards the nearest bus stop as she texts the group chat.

**Rey**

_I assume you guys are both at Rose’s tonight?_

**Rose**

_we just left the motherfukcing hospital_

_do you want us to pick you up?_

**Rey**

_I just left Ben and Maya. I’m almost to the bus stop._

**Rose**

_just wait there omfg do not ride a bus this late_

Rey rolls her eyes.

**Rey**

_The bus isn’t dangerous_

**Rose**

_but we are like 3 mins from you_

_so just wait._

Rey waits under a streetlight, watching insects move in out of the darkness and approach the orange globe. Some of them fall or fly away, but some return after dropping, beating frantic wings in their attempts to embrace what must seem a disappointing moon.

Finn pulls up a few minutes later, a grouchy Rose in her own front seat. Rey climbs in the back: it’s a hatchback, and Rose can’t really move, so she more or less vaults into the backseat. She hits her knuckle on something hard and metal. One of Rose’s tools, probably. She stifles her curse and makes a little space for herself amongst the clutter as Finn grinds the gears a little.

“God _damn_ it Finn if you fuck up my transmission I’m dumping you,” Rose threatens.

“Who’s going to drive you, then?” Finn counters. “I’m practically used to it already, don’t worry.”

They drop Rey off; as she predicted, Finn is going to stay with Rose. She’s changing into her pajamas—a free t-shirt from a 2016 game jam, and shorts she’s had since she was in high school—when her phone chimes.

**Unknown Number (404)**

_Did you get home safely?_

**Rey**

_Is this Ben?_

**Unknown Number (404)**

_Yes. I got your number from Rose._

**Rey**

_I’m home, thanks. Rose and Finn came and got me actually. Have a good night._

He doesn’t say anything else, but Rey saves his number anyway.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Old Fourth Ward is an Atlanta neighborhood that's historically pretty black and poor, but like all cities everywhere, it's being gentrified. I have an idea of where Ben and Maya live, but I'm going to be taking a few liberties with place names and street names whenever its convenient for the story. Does the O4W have a neighborhood 10K? I don't know, but it does have a bus line that goes to Grady, the hospital where Rose is being treated.
> 
> The MARTA (Atlanta's transit authority) is kind of known to have "shady" buses. It's not the US's best mass transit system for various shitty reasons.
> 
> Is there a real Peachtree Pre-K? I have never seen one but I would bet my savings there is at least one in Atlanta, the city where everything is named Peachtree.
> 
> Paige would have been deployed in Afghanistan, where the US still has thousands of people as of this writing. I did not research casualties for the year she would have died in the story. I am trying to be respectful of the real people, Afghan, American, and other, who have died there, so if you feel there's something egregiously wrong, let me know. The characters in this story are going to have Opinions on geopolitics, so if you don't like that, here's your second warning.
> 
> And now I've really used up my chapter buffer. I'll post when I can!
> 
> Please leave a comment or kudos if you feel so inclined, it brightens my day.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A little light sexuality in this chapter. Still an M, but realistically we're heading for an E rating for this story eventually. If you're just here for the wholesome family stuff, I can make notes about what to skip in the future!

Thanks to Rose’s broken ankle and her car’s manual transmission, Rose and Finn enter into a complicated system of driving in order to make it to their respective jobs on time. Rey has the apartment mostly to herself, except for the days where it makes sense for Rose to sleep there.

Rose asks if she can watch Maya again on Sunday afternoon and night, and Rey agrees instantly. She has an interview scheduled for Monday morning, and after a weekend spent manically reviewing her portfolio, she wants to read a children’s book or two.

She takes a little care with her clothes. It’s not because of Ben, she tells herself. After all, she’ll only be seeing him for a few minutes. It’s because she needs to get into the habit of dressing with intention once she gets the real job, which she definitely will get tomorrow. It won’t hurt anyone if Ben thinks she looks nice.

Rey looks at her phone and thinks while she’s on the bus to Ben and Maya’s. Normally she would ask Finn if he thought she had a crush, and they’d talk it out until they determined whether she did or didn’t. Now, she feels a little strange at the idea of broaching the subject with Finn. He’s dating Rose, and what if he thinks that she’s just getting a crush on the nearest available person? What if that _is_ what’s happening, and she’s just focused on Ben and Maya because she’s afraid Rose is going to take Finn away?

She tries to busy herself with re-reading the company biography of her interviewer tomorrow. _Dr. Amilyn Holdo (PhD, Aerospace Engineering, MIT ’97) co-founded Air Resistance in 2000 with Wallace “Wedge” Antilles. The firm quickly became a leader in satellite design and propulsion systems for weather monitoring…_

Rey puts her phone away. She’s read the thing ten times in the last day, she can quote it verbatim at this point.

She takes it back out a second later, intending to look for errors in her CV, but sees a text message.

**Ben**

_ETA?_

**Rey**

_15 mins maybe. I’m on the bus. I thought you said 3 was ok?_

**Ben**

_It’s fine, thank you. Just wanted to check._

**Rey**

_I get it, lol. Don’t worry, I’m always early to things bc I’m paranoid of being late_

He doesn’t respond, though Rey watches the slowly pulsing ellipses on her screen for a little while before they disappear. She scrolls back up to their prior messages.

**Ben**

_Did Rose mention to you that I could use some help on Sunday?_

**Rey**

_Yeah she said you had stuff earlier too._

**Ben**

_Yes, a client I’m meeting across town instead of at my usual place. I can’t take Maya there._

**Rey**

_np just let me know when_

**Ben**

_I will_

Then, a few hours later, another message asking if she could be there by three, and her assurance that she could.

The house is close to the bus stop, and this time, Rey turns the handle to the door and opens it at the same time that she knocks.

“Hello?” she calls, removing her shoes. There’s a thudding of feet, then Maya emerges at a high speed from the hallway. She’s holding a grimy stuffed crocodile (who’s missing a few sewn-on cloth teeth) in front of her like a weapon. Rey starts, alarmed, as Maya skids on socked feet and sticks the crocodile into her face.

“Tick tick tick!” she shouts. Rey reaches out and half-heartedly clamps her hand over the snout.

“Is that what crocodiles say?”

“Hi, Rey.” Ben’s voice drifts from the hallway, then the man himself emerges. He’s wearing workout clothes again, and looks tired, with shadows under his eyes and a faint stubble on his jaw. Neither detract significantly from his general resemblance to a model, in looks or posture. Rey focuses on the stuffed crocodile an inch from her nose rather than the impressive arms casually supporting Ben against the wall.

“Tick, tick, _grrr_ ,” Maya amends, tugging her crocodile free, and flapping its polyester jaws at Rey.

“We watched _Peter Pan_ for the first time today,” Ben explicates. He leans down closer to Rey and speaks in a low voice. “It is actually incredibly racist, I don’t remember that from when I was a kid.”

Rey smiles faintly at him.

“Don’t worry, I won’t mention it to Rose. Next time she can watch _Ferngully._ ” She glances over towards the living room. “I didn’t know you had a TV?”

“I don’t, we watched it on my laptop.” Ben retrieves his sneakers and pulls them on without unlacing them. Rey suppresses a wince. A certain foster mother of hers had been vociferous in pointing out that that was a lazy habit, and an expensive one, and if she was going to stretch out her shoes like that, she could go barefoot. “Anyway, crocodiles are the beasts of the day.”

Rey nods and stands in the middle of the hall while Ben grabs his bag and hugs Maya goodbye.

“I’ll be back soon,” he says, allowing his hair to be imaginary chewed by the crocodile. Then the door is closing behind him and Rey is faced with the task of keeping Maya busy during the day.

~

Rose had told her that Maya can be quiet and reflective, but Rey suspects that this is a trait that emerges when all nearby adults are unresponsive. She sits on the living room couch and listens to Maya recount the plot of _Peter Pan._ She is focused on the crocodile mainly, though there is an interlude where she asks to sprinkle herself and Rey with ‘pixie dust’ so that they can ‘fly.’

“I don’t think you have any pixie dust,” Rey points out, lying ‘captured’ with the stuffed crocodile on her chest.

“Yes, we’ll use this,” Maya counters, emerging from the kitchen with a tall canister of powdered onion. She’s struggling to open the lid, which gives Rey the time to bolt to her feet and take it away.

“This isn’t _real_ pixie dust,” Rey says. “Besides, we don’t have room in here to fly. Go in the backyard and I will find some for us to use.”

Maya looks put out that her solution was not acceptable, but obeys, taking the crocodile with her.

Rey replaces the onion in the cabinet and takes the squat, familiar canister of table salt down, pouring it into a saucer. A little bit of salt tracked into the house wouldn’t do any real harm.

Most of the rest of the afternoon is based around Maya climbing into the low fork of a gnarled plum tree, sprinkling a pinch of salt over her head, and leaping as far as she can into the grass. After being hit at top speed a few times, Rey declines to catch Maya to enable the sensation of really flying. This is not a deterrent and the little girl continues her quest, disregarding a number of falls to her knees and skidding landings upon fallen, rotting plums.

They are still outside when Ben comes back. Rey is crouching in the shade with a glass of water, reading interview prep advice on her phone, when the screen door opens with a creak of springs and Ben sticks his head outside.

“Dad!” Maya abandons the tree and rushes over to him. Rey follows, wincing inside at the sight of Ben smoothing his hands over his daughter’s unruly hair. She remembers again the hum of the road, the blue sky, and someone combing through her hair, and shoves it down.

“She’s been practicing her flying,” Rey tells Ben, as he catches Maya by the arm before she can run into the house in dirty shoes.

“Shoes off, and go wash _all_ the dirt off,” he tells her, brushing her down with a few brisk motions that send tiny pieces of dry grass scattering over the mat.

“I hope that was okay,” Rey says nervously, once Maya is out of earshot. “I only let her climb up to the lowest branch.”

Ben looks over at her, his eyes penetrating as ever.

“She seems fine,” he says. “I’ll make dinner.”

Rey shadows him into the kitchen. He has a faint, strange smell: not just sweaty like he’s been working out, but sharp and metallic, like gasoline or blood, or a laboratory.

_Stop being a creep_ , she tells herself.

So she goes to check on Maya’s progress on cleaning up, which turns into helping her wash her hair while she showers, and then brushing her hair. There’s a bottle of green apple-scented ‘detangling spray’ on the counter, which Rey applies liberally. Maya still engages in some exaggerated wincing as Rey tugs the brush through her hair.

~

Rey feels weird sitting down to eat with Ben and Maya at their little round table. She’s not an afterthought given a quick plate this time, but helps Maya set the table and pours the extra water off the rice.

She stayed once with a family that had family dinners, where all the children were expected to be silent and speak only when spoken to by an adult. That was where she had been hungry a lot, because she was a fidgety, squirmy child, and going to bed without finishing dinner was a near-daily affair.

But Ben mostly doesn’t talk, and when he does, it’s mostly to tell Maya to chew with her mouth closed. Even when she takes more food then he originally put on her plate, he just adds vegetables as well with a raised eyebrow.

Rey helps with the dishes. Ben washes and hands them to her to dry off, and Rey’s fingers feel clumsy and weak every time his brush against hers. He has little black stains on his left thumb and forefinger, like grease or paint smudges, she notices. His fingers are long enough that he can push the dishrag to the bottom of the glasses, even though the opening is too small for his paw-like hands to fit. Rey dazedly lets him direct her to the various cabinets where things belong, reflecting on this knowledge with burning cheeks. She hopes she got a sunburn outside instead of appearing as the awkward, lustful mess she actually is. Maybe she just looks like the stereotype of everyone from Tech, an irredeemable nerd. She can’t decide if it would be better to be perceived as just that, or if her behavior could be forgiven if her crush was obvious. That’s assuming, of course, that it isn’t. The possibility of seeming like a normal person: slim, but perhaps extant?

“Rey?” Ben coughs slightly. She realizes she’s been staring into space for a long minute, drying a dry pan. His eyes don’t look judgmental. That she can tell—she can’t meet them for more than a second. She puts the pan in its cabinet, mentally crossing out the possibility that she seems normal.

“Sorry,” she laughs nervously. “I’m preoccupied, thinking about my interview.” Which is not a lie, but it’s not why she was in a brown study.

“I hope it goes well,” Ben says.

“Thanks,” Rey replies, and orders herself to be quiet.

She helps Maya pack her backpack for school tomorrow, and reads her a story after Ben leaves, just as she did the last time. Maya is fidgety tonight, insisting on pretending that her crocodile also needs to be read stories and receive kisses goodnight, and also several other of her stuffed animals. Rey has to insist on turning the light off when it’s nearly eight, and then Maya needs a glass of water, and then to use the bathroom again.

It’s eight-thirty by the time Rey has ushered her back to bed, clearly overtired and an hour past her designated bedtime. There’s a mild ache building in Rey’s temples.

She really needs to remember to bring something to do when she comes here, because her phone battery is low and Ben doesn’t have a TV. Some reruns of Law and Order would probably dull her nervousness about her interview, but the only thing available here is the bookshelf with the sad pictures.

Rey observes them for a while, then takes a mass-market paperback of _A Tale of Two Cities_ off the shelf and sits on the couch. The familiar words are soothing, long passages about coach rides and barristers, and she’s well into it when the door opens and Ben returns again.

He’s been wearing a jacket that zips up, but it’s open now, and she can see the definition in his chest. There’s a patch of sweat that makes the outline of his upper abs especially sharp. She gets up and sticks the book back onto the shelf, face hot. At least she can’t see his arms.

“I was just reading one of your books, hope that’s okay,” she blurts. Really she means _I’ve looked at your bookshelf and seen all the pictures of your dead wife, I’m sorry_ but that would be harder to say out loud than _I think you’re so handsome I get stupid around you._ Though really, the most embarrassing thing is that she can still get this stupid while fully thinking about these tragic things.

“No problem,” Ben says, his eyes flicking over to the shelf and back to Rey. “Thanks again. Rose said she should be able to make it next week.”

“Well, you know,” Rey says. “It’s really no big deal. Like I said, I like Maya. And hey, I got free dinner again!”

“Well, thanks,” Ben says, getting out his wallet and retrieving three twenties: this time, all crisp and new. Rey takes them, her fingers brushing against his, and sticks them into her pocket. “Good to know you’ll work for food.” He puts his shoes onto the shelf and then shuffles to the side as Rey approaches to get hers. “Good luck on the interview.”

“Oh! Thank you,” Rey says, surprised he remembered. “I guess this is my fallback,” she jokes. “Even when Rose is better, I might show up to beg for dinner.”

“If you’re begging for my cooking, that’s worrisome,” Ben gives a very small smile.

“You won’t take it is a challenge?” Rey asks, trying to smile back normally. She feels like maybe she succeeds.

“I guess I could,” Ben says. “I’ll let you know if I cook something besides plain rice or noodles.”

“Okay, it’s a date,” Rey says, and catches herself as she’s tying her sneakers on. “I mean, obviously it’s not, that’s just a turn of phrase.” She jams her right foot into her shoe without untying it first.

“Hmm,” Ben agrees—she thinks. God, they should just gag her when she’s around him. It doesn’t help that her brain generates a dirty reply to every sentence that comes out of his mouth, as if she never left tenth grade. She nearly bit her tongue off not making a crack about begging for something besides his cooking, and now she makes this unforced error?

“See you later,” she says, and ducks out the door, pausing on the front lawn to smack herself on the head for good measure. Then she walks stiffly to the bus stop, deliberately not looking back at the house.

_“It’s a date”_ isn’t even a thing that people say except in dumb comedies, probably. Rey wouldn’t know, because her dating experience is limited to the dining hall, dorm rooms, and various other free spaces on Tech’s campus. She once watched _A Most Dangerous Method_ on the projector and sound system of an empty lecture hall in the Computer Science building with a guy; that was as close as she had ever gotten to a traditional movie date. Yeah, Ben, with his real life, and kid, and own car, was sure to want to hook up with the girl he met in _cosplay_ who was barely competent to watch said kid, that’s likely. She just has to hope he won’t say anything to Rose, like, _your friend is a freak and probably unbalanced, I want a new babysitter_. Hopefully Rose and Finn won’t talk about her. She doesn’t want Rose to not like her anymore, and not just because Finn would choose his girlfriend over Rey.

She glares at nothing all the way back to her apartment, enough that someone on the bus makes a low-voiced comment to her about smiling, which she ignores.

Finn isn’t home when she gets inside and kicks off her cramped shoes. The back of one was digging into her heel, making her limp.

Stupid, stupid. She runs a very hot shower and washes herself carefully, then blow-dries her hair so that it won’t dry in a strange way overnight.

Her interview outfit, including the bra that doesn’t leave lines on her shirt and the sheer socks that were four dollars for a single pair, is set up for tomorrow. Rey sits on the edge of the tub and shaves her legs meticulously, so that not a single stray hair on her ankles will ruin the line of the socks. Then she takes some masking tape to the jacket, to pick up any overlooked lint. Then she reviews (again) her printed CV, which she is going to hand to her interviewer, because that’s what a prepared person does, in case they want to refer to it.

After all this, she gets in bed and closes her eyes.

Sleep does not come, even after she consciously relaxes all her muscles and counts her breaths.

She has to get up at six, and it’s after eleven. She doesn’t know how to do makeup to make herself look well-rested. She turns over on her uneven mattress a few times, searching out comfort, and groans into her pillow.

When Rey looks over at the alarm clock on her dresser and sees that it’s almost twelve-thirty, she gives in, sticks her hand under the band of her underwear, and rubs herself a little, letting her mind wander away from her looming interview. Her thoughts move immediately to the only thing able to distract her from it: Ben.

She imagines, without much distinction or specificity, a room, a space, where she and Ben are standing. He’s so tall, and she calls up the memory of his broad shoulders in his sweatshirt, his long legs. In her fantasy, he can hold her off the ground as they kiss. He would pull his fingers through her hair, let her sprawl on top of him so she could kiss and bite his shoulders and chest. Or he could cover her entirely with his body. Rey turns so she’s on her stomach, imagines a warm bulk over her, pretends his big careful hands are rubbing between her legs. _I could tell you wanted this_ , fantasy-Ben says in his deep, knowing voice. _But I wanted you, too._

Rey comes silently, legs shaking a little, and then lets herself fall asleep without another thought about what she’s done.

~

Rey’s interview is conducted by Dr. Lamia Darcy, a senior engineer at Air Resistance, in the woman’s spacious office. The walls are decorated with Arts and Crafts prints and satellite schematics, and she tells Rey to have a seat in a chair next to her desk. This way, the desk isn’t quite between them, but Dr. Darcy still has access to her computer and anything else she needs. Rey feels a bit exposed: she’s got her notepad and pen, but a desk would be some armor. She wants to jiggle her leg, and it’s taking effort to _not._

“What do you think you would be bringing to Air Resistance?”

“Well, I really think that my experience with modeling turbulence has been really instructive, and I would like to move that into actual design in your weather systems. I’m interested in the shear forces that can come to bear on sensitive instrumentation and in designing more efficiently around that.” Rey’s voice sounds a little high in her own ears. She’s sweating at the underarms, and is glad she left on her Goodwill-sourced blazer, even though the tag itches her neck.

“That’s certainly an area of interest for us,” Dr. Darcy says. She has a face that Rey can’t read: harried-looking, yet assured. “Tell me about the modeling you’ve done.”

“Well, it was actually for a hypothetical solar energy installation in a high-wind desert,” she says, thinking back to the project.

The interview seems to go by both fast and slowly. Rey feels positively light-headed by the time Dr. Darcy asks what questions _she_ has to ask. She manages something about the environmental ethos of the company, and gets a rather nice pen as a gift as Dr. Darcy walks her out of the firm’s office space, shakes her hand, and tells her to be on the lookout for a call and/or an email.

She takes off the blazer on the bus, because even though it’s October, it’s still hot, and checks her texts.

**Finn**

_Good luck Rey! You’re going to crush it! Me and Rose are taking you out to dinner tonight!_

Rey rolls her eyes, but feels a warmth in her chest. Her friend’s enthusiasm makes her post-interview trembling hands feel a little stronger.

**Rey**

_It’s not a guaranteed thing, it was just an interview! What if I told you it went horribly?_

**Finn**

_Then you would still need dinner. How was it?_

**Rey**

_It was okay: I can’t tell if the interviewer liked me or not :/_

**Finn**

_Who wouldn’t like you?_

**Rey**

_Go back to work or you’ll get fired and then who will buy me dinner?_

**Finn**

_Haha_

_See you later!_

He sends a gif of a cat hugging another, unimpressed cat.

She’s writing a draft of a follow-up email thanking Dr. Darcy and Air Resistance for the interview when another text comes in.

**Ben**

_How was it?_

She doesn’t know exactly what to say. _It went pretty well, thanks for asking! I can’t tell how it was, so I’ll fret from now till I have a result. I was tired, but I could have been more tired if I hadn’t masturbated thinking about you to get to sleep—thanks!_

Rey thinks about her response the whole bus ride home, and once she’s changed into a t-shirt and her most comfortable jeans, she finally replies.

**Rey**

_Not sure, but have to hope for the best. Thanks for checking in._

He doesn’t reply, which is not so surprising, as they’re not really friends, or at least not friends who text. Rey gives herself the rest of the morning off from applications and coding work, and contemplates sending something like “say hi to Maya” to him. She ultimately doesn’t, because she saw Maya yesterday, and she still feels bad for getting off to thoughts of Ben, so she shouldn’t be passing messages to his child.

What a mess. Hopefully she gets the position.

Finn and Rose take her to Café Intermezzo, because Finn knows that she would rather eat dessert than anything else, and egg her on to ordering an entrée _and_ a slice of cake. Rose orders her an espresso with alcohol in it, which is decadent and chocolatey and makes her a little buzzed. Rey tries to at least pay for her slice of cake, but Rose simply waves her ordinary Visa around like it’s a black Amex and only permits Rey to contribute to the cash tip.

Rose efficiently distracts her from thinking about the interview by talking about the contractors she’s had to harangue into making accommodations for her cast on job sites. She has a tired look, which she says is due to trying to make up time on her slowed-down work.

“Really, I’m so glad you can watch Maya, Rey,” she says. “I need those afternoons to work.”

“It’s nice,” Rey says, tongue loosened by the drink she’s nearly finished. “I’ve never seen a functional family in real life before.”

“We do our best,” Rose says, and Rey thinks that perhaps her statement was a downer.

“You’re doing great,” she reassures. “Maya can already read and everything. She doesn’t even need me to read to her at night. Though she does like it.”

Rey takes a bite of cake to stop herself from talking any more. She has no memory of anyone reading aloud to her, aside from when her school classes would crowd onto a carpet and listen to their teacher go through a book. She used to run her fingernails through the carpet and pick at the loose threads to help her sit still.

Why does it usually feel good to be around Maya, but thinking about her like this makes Rey feel sad? Ben probably read her a book tonight, and she’ll be sound asleep, dreaming about Tinker Bell and crocodiles. The image of her tucked into her bed, swallowed in the covers, makes Rey’s heart clench.

Back at home, after brushing her teeth, mostly sober, and listening to Finn and Rose laugh in Finn’s room over something, she opens her messages up again.

**Rey**

_I know Rose is really stressed about her work, so I can keep watching Maya on Sundays. Please don’t worry about paying me_

She could use the money, but she would rather be a friend of Ben and Rose’s and do it for free, she decides. Maybe she isn’t so sober as she thinks. She lies in bed and looks at her framed print and its sketches, of the lonely spaceship-fortress and its forlorn inhabitants. It usually makes her feel a sort of natural melancholy, a sense of wide-open, cool aloneness, which is refreshing and grounding. Now, though, she just feels lonely, looking at the sketch of the ragged girl crouching under her meager shelter.

Her phone chirps.

**Ben**

_Thanks, Rey._

~

An email drops into her inbox at nine-fifteen on Thursday morning, while Rey is eating dry cereal and listening to the coffee maker spit into the pot. She swipes it open with a trembling hand.

_Dear Miss Newman,_

_Thank you for interviewing with Air Resistance. Though we were impressed by your resumé and interview, we are unable to offer you an internship position this year. We wish you all the best in your career._

_Warm regards,_

_Lamia Darcy_

Fuck.

Appetite ruined, Rey goes back into her room, updates her webpage with information about coding commissions, and then signs up to walk dogs for the rest of the day.

If she doesn’t find something soon, she’ll need to take a full time job waiting tables or stocking shelves. For now, Finn is staying here, but their lease is up for renewal in December. He might want to move in with Rose by then, and Rey needs to be practical.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Cafe Intermezzo is a fancy European-style coffeehouse in Midtown. I have been there once or twice. It's out of Rey's budget, but doable for working professionals Rose and Finn!
> 
> Rose probably works as an independent contractor so she will not want to take time off.
> 
> Is Rey ever going to feel anything besides sad and horny? This fic is titled off a Lana del Rey song, so we can't count on it. 
> 
> Hopefully my next update will not be months from now. The whole global pandemic thing kind of fried my brain on this story for a while.
> 
> Your comments are still much appreciated!!


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